HENRY PHILLIPS was one of the most resourceful officers on the Thailand-Burma Railway. From December 1942 to April 1944 he was intelligence officer at Tarsao, the principal jungle camp on the railway. He was instrumental in setting up an operation which collected information culled from local newspapers and clandestine radios and disseminated it by news bulletins or word of mouth.
The reception of news from the outside world played an important role in maintaining morale among the prisoners: Phillips recognised, too, the importance of ensuring that Allied governments knew of the appalling conditions in which prisoners were held, and the location of the camps.
Phillips was twice interrogated by the Japanese military police. On the first occasion he was able to deflect their questions, attributing his ability to do so to his study of the Star Chamber (notorious, particularly under Charles I, for its arbitrary and oppressive judgments) for his MA at London University. But in February 1945 when, as he explained, “the Japanese were getting fidgety and very suspicious,” he was not so fortunate. He was severely maltreated and sentenced to two years’ incarceration in Outram Road Jail in Singapore — the “Belsen of the East”. Arriving at the jail on July 5, he was released the following month and reunited with his fellow prisoners in Changi. In 1946 he was appointed MBE for his work while a prisoner. That year he joined the Colonial Administrative Service, and rose to prominence as a gifted administrator in Nyasaland (now Malawi).
Henry Ellis Isidore Phillips was born in 1914, and attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s School and University College London, where he took his BA in 1936, and his MA in 1939. In 1938 he won the Alexander Prize of the Royal Historical Society, with his essay The Last Years of the Court of Star Chamber, 1630-41.
At the outbreak of war he was commissioned in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment and posted to the 5th Battalion, which was sent to Singapore as part of the ill-fated 18th Infantry Division, which arrived not long before the capitulation on February 15.
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In a letter to The Times, published on October 10, 1947, Phillips argued forcibly for an inquiry into the dispatch of this division, “prodigally thrown to the winds”.
Returning to civilian life, he was recruited into the Colonial Service to go to Nyasaland. He rose steadily up the ranks from his first assignment as an assistant district commissioner in Karonga on Lake Nyasa. In 1953, at the initiation of the Central African Federation, he was seconded to a senior post at the Federal Treasury in Salisbury, Rhodesia.
Returning to Nyasaland in 1957, he rose to financial secretary and in 1960 was appointed CMG. As independence approached he expected to hand over to D. K. Chisiza, but was asked to stay on as Minister of Finance when Chisiza died in an accident. He thus found himself as the only ex-colonial administrator in the first self-governing Cabinet formed by the Malawi Congress Party, while he worked with John Tembo to take over from him.
He became a trusted counsellor and friend to Hastings Banda, the first President of Malawi. He left Africa at the end of 1964, and was knighted.
He started a new career in England, and he married Philippa Cohen in 1966. That year he became chief executive of the Standard Bank Development Corporation. He served on the boards of Sifida (a development company which he had helped to found) and of the Civil Aviation Authority.
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He became active with numerous charitable foundations: housing associations, trusts and with a company formed to promote a cancer therapy. In 1991, he was elected a Fellow of University College London. His memoir, From Obscurity to Bright Dawn: How Nyasaland Became Malawi — An Insider’s Account, was published in 1998.
He is survived by his second wife, Philippa, and by two sons and a daughter of his first marriage, to Vivien Hyamson, which was dissolved.
Sir Henry Phillips, CMG, MBE, colonial administrator, was born on August 30, 1914. He died on December 21, 2004, aged 90.